[meteorite-list] Feeling lucky? Tape a magnet to the bottom of a camel.

From: Matt Morgan <mmorgan_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Jun 22 10:09:48 2006
Message-ID: <449AA4A0.3040101_at_mhmeteorites.com>

Interesting article :)
1,000/gram for Thiel Mountains? I think not. Which Lunars now SELL for
25k/g? None I can think of. Anyone?

Matt Morgan
http://www.mhmeteorites.com

P.S. My Thiel Mts is less than 300/g.

Darren Garrison wrote:

>At least, according to this article.
>
>
>http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/homepage/abox/article_1189656.php
>
>Thursday, June 22, 2006
>
>He owns his piece of the sky
>Collectors of meteorites pay astronomical sums to lay hands on these unearthly
>treasures.
>
>By TOM BERG
>The Orange County Register
>
>GARDEN GROVE ? Something lit up the Norwegian sky on June 7. A streaking
>fireball. Caught on film. Followed by an earth-shaking impact recorded at the
>Karasjok seismic lab at 2:13:25 a.m.
>
>It became international news when University of Oslo astronomer Knut Jorgen Roed
>Odegaard told a local newspaper: "If the meteorite was as large as it seems to
>have been, we can compare it to the Hiroshima bomb."
>
>Those words assured that Norway's meteor would light up more than the heavens.
>It lit up the faces of a rare new breed - meteorite hunters who scour the globe
>for space treasure worth as much as $25,000 a gram - and the collectors who fund
>such expeditions. Collectors like Dave Radosevich.
>
>In just eight years, Radosevich, 42, of Garden Grove has amassed more than 300
>meteorites - including pieces of the moon and Mars and a rock older than our
>very solar system - making his one of the best private collections anywhere.
>
>He hates reading. Took shop in high school. Dropped out of college. Yet the
>Northrop Grumman project manager quotes Kepler and Einstein. He builds massive
>telescopes for universities in his spare time. And just ask him about his
>Allende. His Murchison. Or his Cape York.
>
>THE LIGHT
>
>How to speak meteorite: Say, "I've got a 40-pound Campoover there." Or, "You
>know that Marjalahti I showed you?" or "The smoke trail from that Sikhote lasted
>six hours in the sky."
>
>You refer to your rock as the place it was found, usually the name of the
>closest post office. Truly.
>
>"Allende is older than any Earth rock," Radosevich says, picking up a 1-pound
>meteorite found in Allende, Mexico. "It's older than the sun. The planets. Older
>than any of the solar system. You're holding a piece of a star."
>
>That would make it more than 4.5 billion years old, the estimated age of our
>solar system. Most meteorites hail from the Asteroid Belt beyond Mars. But
>Allende is believed to come from deeper space.
>
>"I've had people 70 years old hold a meteorite for the first time and say, 'I've
>never in my entire life held something so interesting,'" he says. "And you can
>just see the lights come on."
>
>Each rock carries a story. Radosevich pulls a Diablo Canyon from his display
>case. A small chunk of iron now. But 50,000 years ago, it was part of a meteor
>that slammed Arizona like 150 Hiroshima bombs, blasting a 700-foot crater nearly
>a mile across.
>
>His Cape York, from Greenland, holds delicate iron crystals that can only be
>formed after two planets collide, leaving the molten core of one planet to cool
>at the almost incomprehensible rate of one degree per million years.
>
>Then he pulls out his Murchison, from Australia - another meteorite from outside
>our solar system. It was found to have 56 amino acids - 33 of which had not been
>seen before on Earth - when found in 1969.
>
>"It's the most significant meteorite to fall and be analyzed on Earth because it
>contains the building blocks of life," he says. "It's there. It's all there. And
>it's about as extraterrestrial as you can get."
>
>GOLD RUSH
>
>Feeling lucky? Forget the lottery. Go buy yourself a magnet and tape it to the
>bottom of a cane. Or a tractor. Or a camel.
>
>And, by the way, welcome to the new Gold Rush.
>
>Sunland's Bob Verish became rich while cleaning his back yard of rats' nests and
>found two Mars meteorites in a pile of rocks he'd collected 19 years earlier.
>
>Businessman Steve Arnold became famous last year after paying Kansas farmers to
>comb the fields of a famous meteorite fall and unearthing a 1,400-pound
>meteorite filled with iron, nickel and green olivine crystals. You can buy it
>for $1 million. Or see it at Haviland's first annual meteorite festival July 8.
>
>Fifteen years ago - before eBay, before Google, before the rise of the Internet
>- few cared about meteorites. Few knewabout them. You could buy just about
>anything for a buck a pound from all of three or four dealers worldwide.
>
>There was no convenient way to advertise meteorites, to research or buy them.
>You couldn't exactly look up "meteorites" in the Yellow Pages.
>
>"If I'd started back then, I'd be rich," Radosevich says. "Nobody was
>collecting. Even the rare ones, nobody cared."
>
>The Internet changed everything. Suddenly a handful of entrepreneurial treasure
>hunters began studying the best places to search. They fanned out across the
>globe, paying camel drivers in the Sahara Desert, crop pickers in South Africa,
>and children in Mexico to search for heavy, fusion-crusted rocks near known
>meteorite falls.
>
>Others began inspecting suburban rain gutters, four- wheeling through California
>dry lakebeds, and walking along New England rock walls with magnet-mounted canes
>- most meteorites have enough iron to attract a magnet.
>
>The prices now? Try $1,000 a gram for moon rock. And $2,000 a gram for Mars rock
>- 100 times the price of gold. Some rare moon meteorites command $25,000 a gram.
>
>Which is why new rocks arrive every day in the mailbox of UCLA research
>geochemist Alan Rubin, who inspects and authenticates meteorites for the public.
>Maybe one a year is a meteorite. The rest?
>
>Says Rubin, "We call them 'meteorwrongs.'"
>
>UNOBTAINIUM
>
>Norway's streaking fireball, it turns out, was greatly exaggerated. The
>Norwegian astronomer apologized, and word is, a meteorite hunter may have found
>a 60-pound rock - certainly no Hiroshima. What would that take?
>
>First know this: In meteor circles, "fireball" doesn't always equal "gigantic."
>A meteor the size of a grain of sand can be seen as a shooting star because of
>the energy released as it splits the earth's atmosphere, Radosevich says.
>
>One the size of a pencil eraser can be seen to have flames. Basketball-size? A
>good light show. House-size? Several city blocks gone. Half-Dome-size? A city of
>5 million vaporized.
>
>Although meteors enter Earth's atmosphere every day, most entirely burn up.
>Maybe 500 land each year and only one or two of those are found. That worries
>Marvin Killgore of Tucson, Ariz., who's hunted meteorites in 45 countries.
>
>"We're picking them up a lot faster than they're falling," he says. "In a few
>decades, they're going to be all picked up and collected."
>
>Of course, that's what makes them rare. And desirable. Like the meteorite found
>on Thiel Mountain, Antarctica, before the U.S. banned collecting there. For
>Radosevich, it's the Holy Grail: Limited supply. Only two known private
>collectors. $1,000 a gram.
>
>"I call it 'unobtainium,'" he says.
>
>In the meantime, he'll wait for more news from Norway.
>
>"There are probably eight to 10 people over there right now looking for it,"
>Radosevich says. "When they find it, I'll be right here, eagerly awaiting to buy
>it."
>
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Received on Thu 22 Jun 2006 10:09:36 AM PDT